House Justice (42 page)

“That was for hitting her,” he said.

The kid staggered into the van, now bleeding from his nose
and
his mouth, and the van took off.

DeMarco dropped to his knees next to Angela. He touched her face gently and she opened her eyes. Thank God.

“Angela,” he said softly, “don’t move. I’m going to call an ambulance.”

She shook her head and winced when she did.

“No,” she said. “I’m all right. Just help me up.”

“You could have a concussion.”

“Quit arguing with me. Just get me back to the room.”

The hospital was in Tijuana and Mikhail shared a room with an old Mexican man who appeared to have an infinite number of concerned relatives. Right now he was being visited by two fat teenage girls and a woman in her eighties. They had brought him flowers and fruit and magazines to read, and the girls were hovering over him, holding his hands, whispering to him. The old lady was fingering a string of rosary beads. The Mexican, who was recovering from surgery just as Mikhail was, lay there with his eyes closed, obviously in pain, but his relatives didn’t have the good sense to leave him alone.

Mikhail, too, was in pain. He had a drainage tube coming out the right side of his chest, a catheter inserted into his dick, and his back hurt from lying so long in the same position. But he was alive. The surgeon had told him the bullet had been removed and that he should recover completely. Not once did anyone at the hospital ask him how he’d been shot.

As he lay there listening to the Mexican women babble to the old man, he thought about his future. He was sixty-two years old; it was time to retire. He could no longer work for someone like Yuri, where getting shot was a fairly common on-the-job injury. His plan had always been to buy a small house in San Diego and then ensure that he had a steady if not spectacular monthly income. He had managed to save over a hundred thousand dollars, but better than that, he had found
a man, a veteran confined to a wheelchair, who received a handsome disability benefit from the army, and another man, only sixty-six, who received Social Security benefits. Both of these men were childless widowers and it had taken Mikhail almost two years to find them. He still had a few details to work out but when he retired, the men would disappear and he would assume their identities—and their pensions.

But to buy and maintain a house in San Diego was just too expensive; his money would not go far at all. Now, lying in a Tijuana hospital, he was beginning to think that Mexico might be ideal. The weather in Mexico was just as good as in San Diego and he could buy the house he wanted for a fraction of what he would pay in California. And the cost of labor was ridiculously low; he’d be able to afford a woman to clean his house and cook his food.

Yes. That’s what he would do: retire to Mexico. Now the only thing he had to do was find a way to leave Uncle Lev and Yuri, and he suspected that, once he talked to Lev about Yuri, Yuri wasn’t going to be an issue.

He must have fallen asleep because the next sensation he had was someone gently squeezing the big toe on his right foot. He opened his eyes. It was Uncle Lev.

He had no idea how old Lev was. He might be seventy or maybe eighty, but then he could be in his sixties. Men who lived the way Lev had lived had a tendency to age badly.

Lev was only five foot seven but the bulk and the muscles of his youth were still evident. He was wearing a polo shirt and the tattoos on his arms were visible, but the blue and red ink was so faded by time that it was almost impossible to make out the symbols. His head was completely bald, his nose had obviously been broken several times, and the tip of it was dark and a small piece was missing due to frostbite. Mikhail had once taken a steam bath with Lev and knew that he had several more scars on his torso, all made by crude homemade knives, and three of his toes were also missing due to frostbite.

Lev had spent twenty years in the gulags. To survive ten years in the gulags was unusual; to survive twenty was a miracle and this made Lev something more—or less—than human.

Lev smiled. He had beautiful teeth—they were false.

“So,” he said. “You have something to tell me about Yuri.”

Yuri looked at the body of Andrew Bollinger slumped in the chair behind his desk. A .38 automatic was lying on the floor below Bollinger’s right hand.

It appeared as if the degenerate had shot himself.

An hour earlier, he had come to the CEO’s house and convinced him to transfer funds from his savings accounts to Yuri’s account in Mexico. He had been surprised to find that Bollinger had only eighty-five thousand in cash but Bollinger had explained, like Yuri was a child, that cash in a savings account didn’t earn anything and all his money was in stocks, bonds, and real estate. He wanted to pistol whip the pedantic pervert but what would be the point?

So he killed him.

His cell phone rang as he was leaving Bollinger’s house. He looked at the caller ID, and saw it was Ivan. He answered the phone and as he listened his jaw clenched with anger. The gorilla had failed to get Pamela Walker. She had someone with her, a tough bastard who beat the hell out of Pyotr and drove them off. He asked Ivan if the man had a mustache and Ivan said no. But that still didn’t mean that he wasn’t the one who had taken Tully away from Mikhail; mustaches could be shaved.

“What do you want me to do?” Ivan asked.

“I want you to shut up and let me think.”

He could have Ivan stake out the hotel where Walker had been staying but he doubted she would remain there. And now that she knew he was trying to get her, she would be prepared if Ivan tried again. And the man with her, the man he suspected had shot Mikhail and killed Rudy, was obviously good and would be difficult to handle.

As much as he hated to do it, it looked like he was going to have to give up on Pamela Walker. Nothing was going right these days.

He told Ivan not to go home, that the police could be looking for him because of what had happened with Tully. He instructed him to check into a motel, and said he would call him later. When Ivan started to say he didn’t have the money for a motel, he hung up.

It occurred to him that he should check on the status of Mikhail. Hopefully, he was dead by now. If he wasn’t, he would have to kill him; he couldn’t afford to have Mikhail fall into the hands of the police—or, even worse, talk to Uncle Lev. He called the doctor’s home, but no one answered. Did that mean Mikhail was dead? The doctor certainly wouldn’t have left his house if Mikhail was still alive. Still, he needed to be sure.

He drove to the doctor’s but no one answered when he rang the bell. Where the hell was he? The man was an alcoholic; maybe he had passed out. He walked to the back of the house to look in through a window, but the curtains were drawn. Infuriated, he broke the window on the back door and entered the house. He found a pile of bloody bandages in the room where Mikhail had been but Mikhail was gone and so was the doctor. He didn’t understand what was going on.

His cell phone rang again. He thought it must be that idiot Ivan calling back to ask for more instructions. Then he looked at the caller ID.

It was Uncle Lev.

He didn’t answer the phone.

Angela was lying on the bed, still dressed in her jogging clothes, pressing a plastic bag filled with ice against her head.

“We need to get you to a hospital and get your noggin looked at,” DeMarco said.

“I’m all right,” she snapped.

“You were
unconscious
. You could have a skull fracture.”

“I wasn’t unconscious. I was just stunned.”

This was the third time they had had this discussion. The woman was unbelievably stubborn.

“I wonder how Yuri found out I was here,” she said.

“I don’t know, but if he could find you once he can probably find you again. And next time he might not send two morons. We need to get out of this hotel and you need to call your boss and have him send in some reinforcements.”

At that moment, Angela’s cell phone rang. She answered, said “yes, sir,” then got off the bed and almost stood at attention. DeMarco figured it was LaFountaine calling—and it was.

He heard only Angela’s side of the conversation, as she told LaFountaine that they didn’t know anything more about Tully than what had been reported on the news but she was positive that Yuri didn’t have Tully. She also told him Yuri’s men had tried to kidnap her but DeMarco had managed to drive them off. She concluded by saying
that Tully had most likely been kidnapped by the same man who had killed Sandra Whitmore, and then she listened as LaFountaine spoke for a long time. She concluded the phone call with another, “Yes, sir.”

“Well?” DeMarco prompted.

“Ray Rudman is back in his district, in Anaheim, and the director wants us to stake him out.”

“He thinks the mystery man is going to go after Rudman next, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“And he wants just the two of us to protect him? Is he fucking nuts?”

“No. He’s going to send a team out to relieve us.”

“Well, thank God for that.” Then another thought occurred to him. “This guy, whoever he is, has killed Whitmore and kidnapped Tully, and he’s good enough that he’s been able to stay one step ahead of the cops and the CIA the whole time. So let me ask you this. Just how exactly are we going to be able to stop him from killing Rudman when we don’t even know what he looks like?”

“I don’t know. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

There you go
, DeMarco thought.
The CIA motto
.

DeMarco shook his head. “This is wrong. LaFountaine needs to put Rudman under protective custody, and he needs to do it now.”

“He doesn’t want to do that. At least not yet.”

“Yeah, and I’ll tell you why. He
wants
this guy to kill Rudman.”

Angela didn’t say anything, which meant that she knew that he was right.

The florist slowly opened his eyes and for a moment wasn’t sure where he was. Then he remembered: the Holiday Inn. He looked at his watch; he had slept almost fourteen hours.

It was time to complete his mission.

He supposed that Rudman was in Washington, D.C., which meant another long plane ride across the country, but he called the congressman’s
office to verify this. He told Rudman’s secretary he was a constituent who was going to be in Washington tomorrow and he wanted to shake the congressman’s hand and thank him for all his good work. The secretary informed him that Rudman was back in his district and would be working out of his Anaheim office all week.

He thanked the woman and hung up.

Mahoney felt like he was gonna die. In fact, he was
sure
he was gonna die.

Last night, he’d gone to a function by himself because Mary Pat couldn’t go and he always drank more when his wife wasn’t there giving him the evil eye every time he refilled his glass. He was half in the bag before dinner was even served.

The event had been hosted by some tree-hugger group who wanted to reduce carbon emissions to zero—yeah, like he was ever gonna drive a friggin’ Prius—but he attended because they donated money to him every two years when he ran for reelection. He would have left right after the dinner, but then he started talking to some gal—one of the tree huggers—who had a rack on her like Dolly Parton.

He remembered sitting with her by a fireplace, trying to look down her dress whenever she reached for her glass, but wondering the whole time if there was any way he could get someone this young and good-looking into the sack. After that, though, the evening was pretty much a blank. In the morning he found himself lying on the couch in the living room of his condo—somehow he’d managed to get home— and he was still wearing the suit he’d worn to the party, including the jacket. He woke up when his wife poked him, handed him the phone, and told him it was the deputy national security advisor calling. Then she gave him that look she always gave him when he drank
so much he passed out before he could get undressed. She wouldn’t speak to him for the next two days.

He winced when he was told to be at the White House in forty-five minutes. He staggered to his feet and thought he was going to throw up but managed to suppress the feeling. After a shower and a shave, he brushed his tongue for about ten minutes but still couldn’t get rid of that nasty, a-duck-shat-in-my-mouth taste. An hour later he was sitting in the White House situation room, his head throbbing, knowing that all the bourbon he’d drunk the night before was
seeping
out of his pores and everyone in the room could probably smell it.

There was a gaggle of people in the room. The majority and minority leaders from both houses; four White House staff weenies; the chairman of the joint chiefs; and four other military guys: two generals, an admiral, and for some reason a mere major. They were all waiting for the president to show up to tell them why they were sitting there. Mahoney guessed, with all the military guys in the room, that the president was planning to bomb someone.

While they sat there, the generals started whining to the politicians about how they needed more money. That’s what they always did when they had a captive bunch of legislators. Mahoney ignored the pleading and just sat there with his head in his hands, praying for the pain in his skull to abate. Five minutes later, the president, LaFountaine, and the president’s national security advisor entered the room. The national security advisor was a woman named Edna Clouter. She was in her fifties and was one of the homeliest women that Mahoney had ever seen—she made Eleanor Roosevelt look like a beauty queen —but Clouter was also a stone-cold genius.

The president took his seat at the head of the table. LaFountaine and Clouter occupied seats on either side of him.

“Okay,” the president said. “Jake, tell ’em what we’ve got.”